T-Mobile Sidekick Making A Comeback As A 4G Handset

Did you sob uncontrollably when T-Mobile announced it’d be axing the Sidekick back in early July of last year, look up briefly through a veil of tears as rumors of a 4G Sidekick made a brief blip on the radar later that very month, and then eventually slip into the comforting embrace of resignation about ever seeing another Sidekick again when those rumors proved false?

Cheer up.

PCMag.com has confirmed that T-Mobile will not only be launching a new Sidekick during the first half of this year, but that it’ll be a 4G handset to boot.

Without having any further details, it’s impossible to say what this new Sidekick will entail but the fact that it’ll be a 4G phone capable of leveraging T-Mobile’s fast-as-home-broadband HSPA+ data connection seems to indicate that the device will do a lot more than previous versions when it comes to surfing the web. Don’t be surprised to see a nice, slick web browser and perhaps a big, high-resolution touch screen, in other words.

The new Sidekick would presumably keep the QWERTY keyboard and flip-around screen form factor that have graced all the previous versions. What’ll be really interesting to see is if and how a new Sidekick might tie into Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 handsets.

Microsoft bought Danger, the company behind the original Sidekick, and put the acquisition to less than optimal use with the ill-fated Kin project from last summer. If it’s truly serious about Windows Phone 7, it’d be kind of odd to see it spin off yet another mobile operating system. (UPDATE: see next page)

Instead, a Sidekick running Windows Phone 7 with access to the app store may be in the cards, though that may not sit well with fans of the Sidekick interface from days past. Again, this is all purely speculative, so it’s entirely possible that the new Sidekick could be a completely separate offering than Windows Phone 7. We’ll hopefully hear more details in the coming months.